1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods for entry, update, and review of data into databases and generation of medical reports using speech recognition methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently available commercial speech recognition engines work in two fundamental modes: command/control and dictation. The command and control engines constrain the speech to be composed of a set of pre-defined utterances that are defined by a context-free grammar. They must be spoken exactly in order to be recognized. Since this limits the set of utterances that can be recognized it tends to increase accuracy. Dictation modes relax this constraint, allowing relatively unconstrained speech recognition, at the expense of the ability to automatically identify the beginning and end of a logical entry, speed, and recognition accuracy.
Unfortunately, neither of the currently available speech engine modes is adequate for speech recognition in the context of medical record database data entry and medical report generation. Medical records speech recognition systems require the large degree of the flexibility available from a dictation engine coupled with the speed and accuracy of the command and control engine, as well as the ability to associate an utterance with its specific database counterpart. Currently there is a need for such a system.
Furthermore, current speech recognition systems for entry of data into databases that allow unconstrained entry of words, do not provide databases that are ideally-suited for searching. This conclusion is based on the fact that data is not entered uniformly into the database in these systems. Therefore, a database entry of the same information may be represented differently by different users of the database. Searching for this information becomes problematic because of the non-uniformity of the resulting data set—in essence, database search reduced to a text search of the recorded dictation. Therefore, there is a need for methods and systems that allow a user to enter information in an unconstrained manner, but standardize the information so that the same information is coded and stored in an identical manner in the database to facilitate searching.
In order to meet this need the current invention takes advantage of specific knowledge regarding the relatedness of fields within a database, and the expected information to be entered into the database, to allow for relatively natural speech within a predefined context. The methods are particularly well-suited for medical records database data entry and medical report generation.